2 sides of ex-cop emerge in House ‘drug war’ probe

Former police Col. Royina Garma answers questions from lawmakers during the fifth quad-committee hearing held on Thursday, September 12, 2024. Garma was cited for contempt by the panel, after Abang Lingkod party-list Rep. Joseph Stephen Paduano found her lying and evasive in her answers. (Photo from the House of Representatives media bureau)

MANILA, Philippines — A retired police officer who had been linked to the alleged Davao Death Squad (DDS) when ex-President Rodrigo Duterte was the city mayor was reduced to tears at the end of a 12-hour hearing on Thursday when the House quad committee ordered her detained for evading questions on her dealings with the former leader.

The reason: former Police Col. Royina Garma worried about her daughter with special needs, whom she badly needed to come home to.

“I’m telling the truth Mr. Chair,” a distraught Garma said. “I’m not lying. I have a daughter waiting for me who attempted to kill herself three times … she’s waiting for me. I cannot leave her.”

This moved the lawmakers enough to let her daughter stay with her in the House detention facility.

‘Why only one dead?’

“I sympathize with you, Col. Garma,” said Laguna Rep. Dan Fernandez, one of the co-chairs of the four-panel inquiry committee, before asking the House sergeant-at-arms to fetch the former police officer’s 23-year-old daughter.

Garma, who was promoted from head of a police station in Davao to police chief of Cebu City after Duterte took office as president, retired early from the force to be appointed as chair of the Philippine Charity Sweepstakes Office.

During Thursday’s hearing, lawmakers also heard a disturbing side of the former police officer.

Kristina Conti, a lawyer for Raquel Lopez whose son, Rabby, was among the thousands killed in Duterte’s brutal drug war, painted a different picture of Garma when she was in Cebu. Garma “was enraged” and angrily shouted at the young man’s family for holding a wake for him, Conti said.

“She was yelling, ‘Why is there only one dead?’ There are many of them here!” the human rights lawyer told the lawmakers, quoting Lopez’s sworn statement on June 28 during the House committee on human rights’ hearing on extrajudicial killings in the drug war.

Lopez’s son was one of nine men killed on Oct. 4, 2018, in a “one-time, big-time” operation by Cebu police headed by Garma.

She was emotional when she testified, recalling that Rabby, who was then working as a cell phone technician, was shot by the police in his room as he slept. His body was then wrapped in his own bedsheet and thrown out of the house “like a slaughtered pig,” she said.

READ: Garma admits: I can go straight to Duterte

‘Surreal experience’

“Do you remember that incident?” Manila Rep. Bienvenido Abante, another quad committee cochair, asked a stone-faced Garma.

“I cannot recall it, Mr. Chair,” Garma said.

Conti told the Inquirer that it was a “surreal experience” seeing Garma sitting in front of the quad committee investigating extrajudicial killings and illegal activities during the Duterte administration. “Oh, how the mighty have fallen!” she remarked.

“We believe the killings spiked in Cebu because of Garma,” Conti said. “Her attendance at the wake and her snide remarks indicate knowledge, acquiescence, and perhaps even complicity in the premeditated one-time, big-time operation in October 2018.”

“It’s a chilling reminder of how callous she was, looking back at her other interviews as well,” she added.

Conti said that while she commiserated with Garma as a mother who would do everything for her daughter, “this was about the only thing in common between her and the women of the war on drugs.”

She said the mothers of drug war victims had “transcended their personal victimization” and stood up against “injustice and inhumanity and everyone else too.”

“We can’t really say the same for Garma, who has looked out only for her self-interest, enjoyed great power and access to public funds, refused to admit to wrongdoing or rights violations, and consequently, continues to deny any accountability,” Conti said.

Tagged by hitman

Garma had been identified by confessed hitman Arturo Lascañas as the “handler” of hitmen in his testimony to the International Criminal Court (ICC), which is looking at possible crimes against humanity committed in Duterte’s drug war. She denied any role in the DDS.

A former prison official, Police Col. Gerardo Padilla, also told the quad committee that Garma allegedly forced him to go along with a plot to rub out three Chinese drug traffickers serving time at the Davao Prison and Penal Farm in August 2016. Garma also strongly denied Padilla’s allegations.

READ: Ex-prison head does a 180: Garma called me over ops vs slain Chinese

Visa invalidated

She told lawmakers that she and her family had planned to go to the United States on a Japan Airlines flight on Aug. 28. During a stopover in Tokyo, she was told by the airline that she would not be allowed to board the connecting flight to the United States because her visa had been declared invalid.

Garma said she did not know why her visa was suddenly canceled.

Some of the lawmakers believed she was trying to evade the quad committee inquiry as she was invited on Aug. 22 to a hearing on Aug. 28, the day she flew out of the country.
Abante told reporters that her explanation that she wasn’t able to travel to the United States because her visa was canceled was “quite irregular.”

“That is very unlikely. Because there are millions of visa holders, why would she be targeted by the US (State) Department? So, our theory is she wants to go to Japan and stay there for a while,” he said.